O
n September 23 it will be 100 years exactly since Franz Kafka wrote his
breakthrough story, “The Judgement”. We are probably no nearer to
understanding that or any other of his works today than his first readers
were, nor should we expect to be. These books help to show us why.

Eighteen months earlier, on March 26, 1911, Kafka noted in his diary:
“Theosophical lectures by Dr Rudolf Steiner, Berlin”. After commenting on
Steiner’s rhetorical strategy of giving full weight to the views of his
opponents, so that “the listener now considers any refutation to be
completely impossible and is more than satisfied with a cursory description
of the possibility of a defence”, he goes on:

“Continual looking at the palm of the extended hand. – Omission of the period.
In general, the spoken sentence starts off from the speaker with its initial
capital letter, curves in its course, as far as it can, out to the audience,
and returns with the period to the speaker. But if the period is omitted
then the sentence, no longer held in check, falls upon the listener
immediately with full force.”

Only Kafka could experience language with such intensity and express his
response in such a strange and striking way. Two days later he comes back to
Steiner in his diary, either to another or to the same lecture, which he
proceeds to paraphrase in deadpan fashion, interspersing this with comments
about his neighbour:

“Dr Steiner is so very much taken up with his absent disciples. At the lecture
the dead press so about him. Hunger for knowledge? But do they really need
it? . . . Löwy Simon, soap dealer on Quai Moncey, Paris, got the best
business advice from him . . . . The wife of the Hofrat therefore has in her
notebook, How does One Achieve Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? At S. Löwy’s
in Paris.”

(How Does One Achieve Knowledge of the Higher Worlds? was the tantalizing
title of one of Steiner’s books.) Yet Kafka is sufficiently impressed to
make an appointment to see Steiner in his hotel. “In his room I try to show
my humility, which I cannot feel, by seeking out a ridiculous place for my
hat. I lay it down on a small wooden stand for lacing boots.” Steiner is
gracious, however, and tries to put the young man at his ease by asking if
he has been interested in theosophy long. Kafka pushes on with his prepared
speech: A great part of his being seems to be striving towards theosophy,
while at the same time he greatly fears it. “I have, to be sure, experienced
states (not many) which in my opinion correspond very closely to the
clairvoyant states described by you, Herr Doktor.” However, he is also aware
that in those states he did not write at his best, and since “my happiness,
my abilities, and every possibility of being useful in any way have always
been in the literary field”, he is terribly torn.

We never hear how Steiner responds to what Kafka has told him. Instead, this:

“He listened very attentively without apparently looking at me at all,
entirely devoted to my words. He nodded from time to time, which he seems to
consider an aid to strict concentration. At first a quiet head cold
disturbed him, his nose ran, he kept working his handkerchief deep into his
nose, one finger in each nostril.”

And with that Steiner disappears from the diaries.

June O. Leavitt, who begins her book with this episode, describes Kafka here
as “ridiculing” Steiner’s claims and “satirizing” his psychic powers and
self-appointed mission of enlightening humanity, describing the last
paragraph as “facetious”. However, she argues, “Kafka’s yearning for
transcendental mind continued despite his disappointing meeting with
Steiner”. Throughout his life, she maintains, Kafka was torn between his
desire to write and his experience of out-of-body states, which he longed
for yet dreaded.

This brings out well how even the most learned and well-meaning critics, if
they are not very careful, will start with a slight misreading and end in
the further reaches of absurdity. For Kafka’s description of Steiner’s
lecture and of their meeting follows the same pattern as everything else in
the diary: he notes everything he sees and that happens to him with puzzled
and scrupulous detachment. Pace Leavitt, he is not satirizing Steiner or the
Frau Hofrat (or himself for the comedy with the hat), but merely noting it
all, as though trying to pierce a mystery which is immediately
comprehensible to everyone but himself.

Leavitt is surely right to remind us of the enormous popularity of theosophy
and related notions in the European fin de siècle. Not only Steiner but Mme
Blavatsky seemed, for many thinking people in the West, who had lost faith
in organized religion, to provide the answer to their spiritual yearnings.
W. B. Yeats, Maurice Maeterlinck, Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian were
all adepts and excited proselytizers at one time or another, and T. S. Eliot
introduced a “famous clairvoyante” into The Waste Land. It’s not at all
surprising that Kafka should have been interested in and knowledgeable about
theosophy, and Leavitt is right to suggest that his apparent fascination
with Jewish mysticism, which scholars have made much of in recent decades,
probably came to him via Christian (and debased) sources. Eliot’s take on
Mme Sosostris was, of course, at the opposite pole from Yeats’s or
Kandinsky’s. Where does Kafka stand? He was, we know, a notorious faddist,
solemnly subjecting himself to nature therapy, raw food diets and
gymnastics, Mazdazanism, Fletcherism and the rest. But what of his writing,
which is surely the important thing? Leavitt trawls his oeuvre to find
examples of mystical experiences and out-of-body states, but her
insensitivity to context and nuance grows more pronounced with every page.

She examines in detail the long, abandoned story, “Description of a Struggle”,
written around 1904. The narrator here seems able merely to wish something
for it to happen: “So I happily spread out my arms in order to fully enjoy
the moon. And by making swimming movements with my weary arms it was easy
for me to advance without pain or difficulty . . . . My head lay in the cool
air”. This indeed seems to be an example of levitation, and Leavitt,
enlisting Steiner and Blavatsky, explains that we are in the presence of an
“ether-body”, which is the true body, not the physical body we carry around
with us. Now this may be theosophical doctrine. But one wonders if the main
reason why Kafka abandoned the work was that it was too easy to do this sort
of thing in fiction: if you can make the body fly merely by wishing it, you
can do anything – but by the same token you have done nothing. Kafka was
looking for a form of art that would be true to all our desires – including
the desire to escape the body – but would also be ready to examine these
desires. That is why when he did finally agree to let Max Brod find a
publisher for his early work he ignored the long and complex but ultimately
unsatisfactory “Description of a Struggle” and selected instead tiny
fragments that seemed to him more “true”.

Later Leavitt examines one of Kafka’s last stories, “The Bucket Rider”,
written when he had finally escaped Prague and gone to Berlin with Dora
Diamant, to endure there a terrible winter of freezing conditions and
dreadful food scarcity. “To grasp the inverted perspective of ‘The Bucket
Rider’”, says Leavitt, “it is necessary to penetrate the narrative façade,
which Kafka critics have not done.” These kinds of sentences usually herald
a total misreading, and this is indeed what we get here. “Coal all spent,
the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing out cold, the room
freezing; I must have coal; I cannot freeze to death; behind me is the
pitiless stove, before me the pitiless sky.” This is a terrifying
evocation of human destitution and desperation. The narrator goes on: “So I
ride off on the bucket. Seated on the bucket, my hands on the handle, the
simplest kind of bridle, I propel myself with difficulty down the stairs;
but once downstairs, my bucket ascends . . . . And at last I float an
extraordinary height above the vaulted cellar of the dealer”.

Alerted by the idea of flying, Leavitt is away: “Mystical logic allows
expansion of perspective beyond the conceptual framework of time and space.
I claim that the narrator has already frozen to death; he is a disembodied
spirit. The narrative concerns a soul in crisis”. The story ends: “And with
that I ascend into the regions of the ice Mountains and am lost forever”.
Leavitt fastens on the expression Nimmerwiedersehen, literally “never to be
seen again”, and concludes: “This bucket rider has relinquished his craving
for materiality to migrate to a higher world”. All the pain of the story’s
realism is dissolved into a cosy mysticism which may bring comfort to some
but does a gross disservice to a painfully honest writer.

The book grows more dotty as it progresses. The pity is that Leavitt has a
good though modest point: that Kafka’s interest in theosophy and other forms
of fin-de-siècle religiosity aligns him with a great many of the major
artists of the period, and that dismissing this as due to personal fads, or
placing an exclusive emphasis on Jewish mysticism, distort the picture. But
as so often in Kafka studies, an initial insight is ruined by insensitivity
to the way language works in the texts and to the overall evidence of the
diaries, the letters and the rest of the fiction.

Stanley Corngold seems to have established himself as the doyen of American
Kafkaists. Ruth V. Gross’s preface to Kafka for the Twenty-First Century,
co-edited with Corngold, sets the tone. The idea, she explains, was “to
assemble a number of distinguished Kafka researchers from North America and
Europe to examine together the ways in which this extraordinary writer, who
so decisively shaped our conception of the twentieth century, might suggest
fruitful strategies for coping with the twenty-first”. But who ever imagined
that writers should give us “fruitful strategies for coping”? They have
quite enough on their plates trying to say what they feel they have it in
them to say. She goes on: “How do we compose a complete and coherent account
of a personality with so many often contradictory aspects?”. Again, this
sounds good, but what on earth would a “complete and coherent account” of
anything be like? Should we even aim for that?

Two of the essays, on “Kafka and Israeli Literature” and “Kafka and Italy”,
explore those writers from Italy and Israel whose work exhibits “familiar
Kafkaesque themes, such as metamorphosis, existential absurdity,
bureaucratic nightmares, marginality, power, and identity”. One had hoped
Kafka studies had progressed beyond this level, but apparently not. Some,
though, start off by opening up interesting areas of research, only to
follow the Leavitt route of obsessiveness. Thus Roland Reuss asks us to go
behind the printed texts to the manuscripts, where we will find that the
editors, however sensitive, have all made decisions which cut out
alternatives the manuscripts leave open. This dilemma is not, pace Reuss,
unique to Kafka editors, but has been interestingly explored in recent
decades by those working on the manuscripts of Proust and Joyce – it is of
course particularly the case with works, such as the later volumes of À la
Recherche and many of Kafka’s stories, where the work was not published in
the author’s lifetime. The story Brod called “Prometheus” is found in
Kafka’s Octavo Notebooks, entirely crossed out. The concluding paragraph
reads in English: “Legend attempts to explain the inexplicable; because it
arises from a ground of truth, it must end again in the inexplicable”. The
editors of the Fischer edition (who, having claimed that they would not
include anything that had been crossed out, clearly felt that crossing out
an entire story did not count and silently included it) noticed an insertion
sign in the manuscript at the start of the story, and so placed the sentence
there – thus dealing a blow to Hans Blumenberg, who based his entire
interpretation of the story, in his great Work on Myth, on its coming at the
end. Reuss notes, however, and he gives us photographs of the MSS to prove
his point, that there are not one but two insertion signs in the story, at
different places – where should the sentence really go?

This is a fascinating reminder that what we are dealing with is something
written, and often written in the heat of inspiration. It is less a “text”
than a process. This is important, but Reuss does his cause no good when he
goes on to examine another passage, this time from the MS of “The Hunter
Gracchus”, which reads: “ich tot tot tot. Weiss nicht warum ich hier bin”.
(I, dead dead dead. Know not why I am here.) The first five words, he points
out (and again shows us the evidence) are on one line, the last five on
another. This suggests, he says, that we must take “ich tot tot tot Weiss”
as a unit, and read the last word as a noun, white, rather than a verb, to
know – which gives us the Mallarméan line “I [the written word, black on the
white page] dead dead dead white”. We are back in Leavitt territory.

John Zilcosky has a fascinating essay on Kafka and trains, alerting us to the
fact that in the early twentieth century there was as much anxiety about
what train travel might do to you as there is today about jet travel. Apart
from “train-induced neuroses”, symptoms included failing vision and eye
fatigue, caused by the unnatural speed of trains. Gregor Samsa, we learn
early on in “The Metamorphosis”, is a commercial traveller. It could just be
that what he feels he has become, an insect, whose vision is getting worse
by the day, is the result of the unnatural life he has to lead. He himself
wonders if what has happened to him is simply that he has contracted a
“standing ailment of commercial travellers”. At the end of the story,
Zilcosky suggests, we move from inhuman trains and what they can do to you
to the much more “human” tram, which takes Samsa’s parents and sister out
into the country, “ins Freie”. Though whether that ending is “positive”, as
everyone in these books seems to think, or bleak in the extreme, as Maurice
Blanchot (who is strangely absent from modern academic discourse on Kafka)
suggests, persuasively in my opinion, is an open question.

One of the virtues of Zilcosky’s essay is that it doesn’t imagine that trains
will explain everything in Kafka. The same modesty can be found in Ritchie
Robertson’s essay on the new awareness of and writing about bureaucracy at
the turn of the century and how Kafka draws on that, and in Doreen Densky’s
essay on Kafka and the insurance business. But the best moments in Kafka for
the Twenty-First Century are those which return us to the detail of Kafka’s
own writing, often of fragmentary and little-regarded bits and pieces, which
immediately reminds us why we read Kafka in the first place. It is clear
that much of the power that readers of Kafka’s (like Eliot’s) work felt from
the start has as much to do with these writers’ incomparable ear as with any
theme such as “despair” or “alienation” – though it is an ear always working
in the interests of the whole. Both Kafka and Eliot were fastidious in what
they published. Kafka’s diaries are full of laments at how “dead” and
“inert” he finds what he has just written; very occasionally, though, he
grants that some of it “lives”. We need to understand what constitutes the
life of these mysterious works.

We need to understand what constitutes the life of these mysterious works

Mark Harman, noting that in much of Kafka’s writing there is a tension between
his amazing linguistic ability and his doubts about the adequacy of
language, quotes the very first piece of writing by Kafka that has come down
to us, an entry in a girl’s keepsake album: “How many words there are in
this book! They are meant for remembrance! As though words could remember!
For words are poor mountaineers and poor miners. They cannot bring down the
treasure from the mountains’ peaks, or up from the mountains’ depths”. Kafka
was seventeen when he wrote that, in 1900. It reminds us that, from the very
beginning, his extraordinary gifts were allied to an extraordinary clarity
of mind that would not allow him to deploy those gifts unquestioningly.

In another interesting essay Uta Degner looks closely at one tiny piece,
“Absent-Minded Window-Gazing” (“Zerstreutes Hinausschaun”, which Kafka
included in his first volume, Betrachtung, 1913), and shows how carefully
and with what a fine ear Kafka used language. The piece tells of a “we”, a
“you”, who goes to the window and looks out as the sun is setting after a
grey day and sees it lighting up the face of a little girl “who strolls
along looking about her”, but is “eclipsed” by the shadow of a man
overtaking her. “And then the man has passed and the little girl’s face is
quite bright”, the piece ends. The man, Degner suggests, “embodies a linear
reader, who passes through the text quickly; the girl follows a more sedate
model of reading” – letting her mind wander, as we should let ours hover
over the story, noting mirrorings and correspondences, and not rushing to
any conclusions.

Franz Kafka: The ghosts in the machine, by Corngold and Benno Wagner, is
largely dominated by a recent addition to the Kafka corpus, The Office
Writings. This is not surprising, since Corngold and Wagner (along with Jack
Greenberg) were also the editors of that volume (Princeton University Press,
2009). And it’s not quite like, say, Faber publishing Eliot’s Collected
Blurbs (though I wouldn’t mind reading that). Kafka, they remind us, was not
a simple cog in a large administrative machine, but a lawyer with the
Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. And as
Corngold and Wagner make clear, workers’ accident insurance was something
fairly new, the result of a great shift in thinking about individuals and
their responsibility for their lives. For in an accident, and especially an
accident that occurs in the workplace, we are at the intersection of the
individual (who has, say, had his thumb cut off) and the statistical
average. Kafka, they plausibly suggest, mines this duality in his literary
works. Unfortunately the curse of the Kafka critic soon takes over. Talking
of the little parable, “The Building of the Great Wall of China”, they write
in their introduction: “Invaders and invaded share the risk of mutual
destruction. At the same time the paradox of the breachable wall almost
certainly alludes to Kafka’s affirming a system of comprehensive accident
insurance for both on-site and off-site industrial injuries that nonetheless
allows for negotiable gaps”. If the words “almost certainly” set alarm bells
ringing, we are soon mired deep in academic waffle, with Corngold much the
worse offender.

Wagner too can be seduced by his own cleverness, but the volume as a whole is
redeemed by ten wonderful pages in which he compares two descriptions of
street accidents: the opening of Robert Musil’s Man Without Qualities and a
passage from Kafka’s account of his trip to Paris with Brod. In the first,
on “a beautiful August day in 1913”, in the heart of Vienna, a heavy truck
has knocked down a pedestrian. “The event unfolds as the collision between
technology and life”, suggests Wagner.

“The crowd of onlookers, while agreeing that the truck driver was not at
fault, is incapable of taking individual action: all they can do is kill
time until the rescue service arrives. This substitution of human instinct
by technological process recurs in the conversation between two of the
spectators, a gentleman and a lady. While the lady is overcome by a wave of
nausea “which she credited to compassion”, the gentleman offers relief in
the form of a technical explanation relating the accident to the long
braking distance of heavy vehicles. Accidents, he explains, are a necessary
evil, citing statistics from America, according to which 190,000 persons
were killed and 450,000 wounded annually in traffic accidents.”

Ten years before Musil began his great unfinished novel, Kafka described in
his travel diary for September 11, 1911 an accident he had witnessed at a
busy crossroads in Paris:

“Automobiles are easier to steer on asphalt surfaces, but also harder to bring
to a stop. Especially when/if the gentleman at the wheel, taking advantage
of the wide streets, the beautiful day, his light motor-car and his skill as
a driver . . . at the same time weaves his car in and out at crossings in
the manner of pedestrians on the pavements. This is why such a motor-car, on
the point of turning off into a side-street and while yet on the large
square, runs into a tricycle; it comes gracefully to a halt, however, does
little damage to the tricycle, has only stepped on its toe, as it were.”

“Musil uses the genre of the novel to generate a – however decentred and fluid
– allegory of the psychological dynamics of prewar Central Europe”, Wagner
notes. “His account aims at a representational relation between fiction and
reality. Kafka’s diary takes us outside this distinction.” In his analysis
of the passage Wagner shows how Kafka moves from the general (“automobiles”)
to the more specific as this particular event is narrated, though it’s
difficult to say when precisely we move from one to the other, the
transition perhaps resting on the ambiguity of the German wenn – which could
be either temporal (when, whenever) or conditional (if). By the third
sentence we are with the specific accident, though even that is hedged in by
the generalizing “This is why such a motor-car . . . runs into a tricycle”.
“We are now”, says Wagner, “close to the centre of Kafka’s writing, which
arises from the permanent oscillation between the real space of the factual
event and the virtual space of the probable event.” And he proceeds to
explore this by following Kafka’s account of what then happens: first the
mute replaying of the incident as “the automobile owner with raised palms
simulates the approaching automobile”; then the gathering of a crowd of
spectators, all of whom have views about what has just taken place; and
finally the arrival of the policeman, who proceeds to write down a report of
the incident in his notebook. Unfortunately, Kafka goes on, “something has
gone wrong with the policeman’s notes, and, for a while, in his effort to
get it right, he sees nothing further . . .”. The spectators’ hope that the
authoritative figure of the policeman will finally bring order and clarity
is quickly seen to be vain. The passage ends with the policeman still
scrutinizing what he has written and trying to bring some order into that.

This is not one of the great stories but an early passage in a travel diary,
and yet so many of the elements we associate with Kafka are already in
place. By treating it with the attentiveness it deserves, Wagner makes us
recognize how all Kafka’s writing is of a piece, from first to last. He
could have developed his analysis even further by showing how the desire of
the reader (if not of the spectators who soon become participants in the
event) for clarity, for a transcendental authority or its representative to
tell us exactly what’s what, looks, with the arrival of the policeman, about
to be fulfilled; but then the vertical is, as it were, subsumed into the horizontal,
as the pronouncement of judgement is turned into the endlessness of (merely
human) writing. But he has done what we require of all good criticism: not
provided answers but set us on our way to appreciation.

David Suchoff, in Kafka’s Jewish Languages: The hidden openness of tradition,
has much less than Leavitt, Zilcosky or Wagner to work with: a long diary
entry of December 24, 1911, already mined by Deleuze and Guattari, on the
literatures of minority languages; an address on the nature of Yiddish given
in February 1912 to introduce an evening of Yiddish readings by his actor
friend Yitzhak Löwy; diary entries on his reading in the history of Hebrew
literature; and his late decision to learn Hebrew along with his one letter
in Hebrew to his old teacher on her return to Palestine. Suchoff examines
these with a manic zeal and reports on his findings in a contorted language
that veers from the clumsy to the incomprehensible: “The ‘dog-like muzzle’
imposed here” (in Kafka’s description of a performance by the Yiddish
Theatre at the Café Savoy), like the one mocked in The Trial, is the
censorship that would condemn every species of national identity to perform
a stereotype of itself. To wear the “muzzle” is thus not to squelch [sic]
the animal – whether coded as Jewish, African, or Irish, or any other
national type – but to transform the canine voice into a murderous
singularity of form.

Commenting on the terrible conclusion to “The Judgement”, the story that came
to Kafka in the night of September 22–23, 1912, and which he always felt
marked the moment when he found his true voice, Suchoff writes: “‘I sentence
you to death by drowning’ names the conclusion of the story as a movement
toward life, reflecting Kafka’s recovery of the meaning of Yiddish from the
dour Jewish fathers of his generation. Georg’s final position between bridge
and river thus defines Kafka’s trajectory toward the fluidity of the
multilinguistic imagination that animates his later prose”.

He does have interesting things to say about the way all languages are impure,
and especially about the way both Goethe and Jakob Grimm, Germany’s greatest
classic writer and the first historian of its language, recognized and
explored this. And he is interesting too on the debates that took place
around the establishment of Hebrew as the language of the Jews of Palestine
(Kafka’s Hebrew teacher, Puah Ben-Tovim, was the daughter of Zalman
Ben-Tovim, a distinguished Hebraist who was also the neighbour in Jerusalem
of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew). The pity is that he
felt he had to tie all this to poor Kafka.

Literary Passports: The making of modernist Hebrew fiction in Europe by
Shachar M. Pinsker hardly mentions Kafka, since he wrote in German, not
Hebrew or Yiddish, yet succeeds in throwing genuine new light on him.
Pinsker is concerned to rescue writers of Hebrew and Yiddish poetry and
fiction in the early years of the twentieth century, who were in large part
Russian, from the Israeli narrative in which they have usually been placed.
Rather than as forerunners of a vibrant Israeli literature, he argues, we
must see them as rooted in European modernism, sharing many of the same
interests and obsessions as their non-Jewish contemporaries all over Europe.
And, of course, as their Jewish contemporaries such as Kafka.

In the first of three sections Pinsker explores, with the aid of old
photographs, the cities and cafés where these writers congregated, from
Odessa to Whitechapel in London. This focus on café culture in the old
Europe makes clear how European modernism grew out of a combined sense of
rootlessness and comradeship. We had known this with Picasso and his circle
in pre-war Paris, and with the Viennese intellectuals, but by casting his
net so wide Pinsker shows how the cafés were in a sense the soil out of
which so much that was radical flourished and grew. His second and third
sections, on sexuality and the problematics of tradition, are a little more
predictable, but still profoundly illuminating. And illuminating of Kafka as
well – who, no less than Yosef Haim Brenner, S. Y. Agnon and David Fogel,
spent much of his early years in literary cafés, was wracked with
contradictory and confusing sexual urges, and struggled all his life to
define his personal relation to tradition.

This is so illuminating, for those interested in Kafka, because it brings out
starkly Kafka’s uniqueness, the way in which, tackling common themes and
issues, he spoke in a voice that was, always, utterly his own. Pinsker
quotes a fascinating passage from an early novella, Mi-saviv le-nekuda
(Around the Point), written by Brenner while he was living in Whitechapel in
1904 and never translated. The hero, Ya’acov Abramson, undergoes a crisis on
a bridge as he is about to commit suicide. It’s a powerful passage, and
Pinsker performs a little miracle of exegesis in bringing out its biblical
and cabalistic echoes – but it is still fairly conventional in the way it
explores the inner life of the protagonist. We are in a world made familiar
by another solitary figure on a bridge, the figure in Edvard Munch’s “The
Scream”. The end of “The Judgement” also involves a bridge and the hero’s
suicide, but its brevity, speed, quietness and disconcerting oddness
(Bendemann’s prowess as a diver is evoked even as he plunges into the waters
below), as well as its extraordinary last sentence, puts it in a class
apart.

“Impatience led to our expulsion from paradise”, wrote Kafka in one of his
aphorisms, “and impatience stops us returning.” The besetting sin of the
Kafka critic is impatience, the need to locate the mystery and then solve
it, as it were, the need to move, like the man in that early story, across
the text from beginning to end, not stay with it, savour it, allow it slowly
to come into focus. To do this we have first of all to recognize that the
best way in to Kafka is not via an idea – Kafka and mysticism, Judaism, the
insurance business or the condition of modernity – but via his unique way of
approaching his material. To return to the episode with which I began,
Kafka’s visit to Steiner: his tone, neither “ironic” as Leavitt suggests,
nor purely descriptive, might remind us of other passages in his writings
where an authority figure comes under intense scrutiny in an effort to
understand where the wellspring of his power lies. The Letter to his Father
is the classic example, but it is to be found everywhere in Kafka. In 1916,
during a stay in Marienbad, for example, he describes to Brod in great
detail the surprise visit of the holy rabbi of Belz with his solemn
entourage.

“He inspects everything, but especially the buildings; the most obscure
trivialities interest him. He asks questions, points out all sorts of
things. His whole demeanour is marked by admiration and curiosity. All in
all, what comes from him are the inconsequential comments and questions of
itinerant royalty, perhaps somewhat more childish and more joyous. At any
rate they reduce all thinking on the part of his escort to the same level.
Langer tries to find or thinks he finds deeper meaning in all this: I think
that the deeper meaning is that there is none, and in my opinion this is
quite enough. It is absolutely a case of divine right, without the absurdity
that an inadequate basis would give to it.”

There is nothing in the outward appearance or in the actions of the holy rabbi
of Belz which would indicate holiness; on the contrary. Yet that is
precisely what is so terrifying and authoritative about him. His very
childishness is proof of the gap that lies between him and us.

Gabriel Josipovici’s recent books include What Ever Happened to
Modernism?: A critical essay, and Heart’s Wings: New and selected stories,
both published in 2010. A new novel, Infinity: The story of a moment, was
published earlier this year.